When I saw the headline in Friday’s Press Democrat, “Home sales slow inSonomaCounty, but short sales jump,” my immediate reaction was “Oh wow, that’s us they’re talking about!”

The headline was very pertinent to our situation because we had just gotten word the day before that the bank had approved the short sale offer on our house. So while we still have some hurdles to jump before our house becomes a statistic in next month’s “completed sale” category, our agent advised us to start making provisions to move. The bank says we’ve got until November 12 under the current agreement. I guess I’ll put packing tape on the shopping list and forget about pruning the lavender.

So as Steve put it, we’ve gone from anxiety about if we’re going to move to anxiety about where we’re going to move. How we tackle moving out of the house that we’ve lived in for the last 17 years isn’t just a theoretical exercise anymore.

Where to start? To literally lighten our load and thinking about going through all the stuff in the garage is just to horrible to contemplate right now, we started sorting through books this weekend – art books, graphic design books, history books, coffee table books, children’s books. By the time we were done taking the discards off the shelves, we probably had a ton of books stacked waist high in our entry way.

Then it was time to perform triage on them: sell, give away, or recycle. The “How to Draw” books, history of Disney books, and nice art books, we hope to sell to Copperfield’s for a few bucks. All of the children’s books are going to Goodwill. I hope our copy of Goodnight Moon finds a good home.

But there are some books that are destined for the recycling bin. They are just too worn, marked-up or outdated. Goodwill seems willing to accept everything we’ve ever dropped off but I doubt that there’s much of a demand by shoppers at any store for a copy of Word 2002 for Dummies.

On the way home from Goodwill, Jennifer whose only experience with moving has been relocating her stuff  to her older sister’sroom down the hall after she left for college, wanted to know what she should expect when it came time to move. I told her that moving is messy; there’s really no way around the chaos that it creates. But bring it on…it’s what we’ve been waiting and praying for.